5 or so years ago, I did an interview about Anodyne 1. I said there wouldn’t be a sequel. Well, now it’s 2018 and, last I checked, I’m sure making a game called “Anodyne 2”. Did something change?

Back then, I was against making a traditional sequel, where we would do mostly the same thing but with new levels. That’s why, instead of just being “Anodyne 1 but different levels,” Anodyne 2 is more the next installment in the “Anodyne Franchise”, like Final Fantasy or Zelda games. Kind of like Nier: Automata,Anodyne 2 is a standalone game, and differs in some ways from the original, but has its commonalities, some narrative continuity, and can be understood more deeply if you’re familiar with the original.

Why didn’t we do a traditional sequel, like Pokemon Gold, Banjo-Tooie, Spyro 2, Dark Souls 2, or most other corporate game sequels?

In this life, we only live so many years. There are certain skills – like making 3D games – that I want to hone and learn, and if a game is entirely just Anodyne 1 again but some additional content and new dungeons, I don’t think that’s the best way to spend my time.

Plus, an “Anodyne 1-2” would be weird. There’s not a great way to create a sequel that incorporates Young. For the most part, Anodyne 1’s story was one and done. Of course, maybe in 5 years I’ll be making Anodyne 1-2 and eating my words. Time changes odd things.

Eh, also, trying to replicate the experience of Anodyne would just lead to it being overshadowed. If you really want Anodyne again… I understand where you’re coming from, but your dream of having a new experience that makes you feel exactly what Anodyne did, is, sadly, impossible. Even if we made the best game ever that was really similar to Anodyne, it would be overshadowed. Anodyne 2 will be a good, memorable time, but it’ll be different.

Some things in life just happen once. In transience is beauty… something, something. Different flavors are good. Spice of life. Etc.

I can’t just keep making more of the same – this world can’t keep doing more of the same.

I think a ‘sequel’ or series installment succeeds when it reflects upon the components that made its predecessor good, and then responds to that material in an interesting way. Nier is a great response to Ocarina of Time. Anodyne is a great response to Link’s Awakening. Likewise, Anodyne 2 is a response to Anodyne. We learn from it, tweak some mechanics, add some new gameplay, remove some gameplay, and incorporate the current narrative ideas and themes and stories that we currently really care about.

As another similarity, the high-level game structure of Anodyne 2 has similarities to Anodyne, but 3D gameplay replaces some of the 2D areas.

The reason Anodyne 2 isn’t just a new IP is because well, the 2D levels play like Anodyne, NPCs are designed with Anodyne’s style in mind, you won’t be able to predict where you’ll go next, etc. The plot is overall clearer but it’s very much still a surreal, dreamy fantasy. Cards and Dust make a return but with different uses. There’s shared elements, just like in a Final Fantasy or Zelda installment. So, it’s called Anodyne 2.

Names

I should mention, we were considering calling it “Anodyne: Return to Dust” or “Anodynia” or something like that. Perhaps one of those choices would show more integrity as to what “Anodyne 2” really is?

But, you have to also look at it from the perspective of us not being Square Enix or Nintendo: it’s going to be far, far more confusing if we don’t put the 2 in there. As an indie, someone might perceive “Anodyne: Return to Dust” as a DLC package! If we use “Anodynia”, that won’t get eyes as fast as “Anodyne 2”. With the ‘2’, it’s obvious that it’s

Related to Anodyne

A separate game

The ability to call something “Series Name: New Subtitle” and become popular relies on being a series entrenched into culture. We don’t have that clout. So yes, to an extent it is a branding decision, but I hope that makes sense given our hope to continue past Analgesic Productions’ 7th birthday.

Even with this disclaimer, I can predict the exact wording of some negative reviews due to us ‘veering too much off course!’. Well, if that future reviewer is out there, well, I hope you like being screenshotted and used as a joke 3 years from now.

Anyways, I’ll end with this:

We’re the people who made Anodyne 1, Even the Ocean, All Our Asias. We’re dedicated to making excellent work.

Would you really expect us to just make the same damn thing a second time? I hope not!

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/sequel/feed/0seanhantani“Complex”https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/complex/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/complex/#respondWed, 21 Nov 2018 22:43:22 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3391Every one of the 80 or so collectible dragon in Spyro the Dragon’s remaster is uniquely modeled and animated. They each appear for about 10 seconds on screen. It’s a fact that these dragons are entirely pointless to the overall game and that the amount of work that went into them borders on reckless.

Recently Marina and I have tossed around the term ‘complexity’ when it comes to making Anodyne 2.

Complexity is easiest to explain on the level of visual art. It’s the trap for beginner game developers, especially those attuned to visual art but not other aspects of design. It happens when any of the following get too big for the artist to handle.

Number of art assets in the game (characters, enemies, environment objects)

Number of animations per art asset

Art style

If there’s too many art assets or animations, each asset takes longer to revise, and overall art production takes longer. Risks a revision. Art style being elaborate just makes that worse. Imagine hand-painted or pixeled backgrounds. The iteration takes a very long time. This is why if you see a game with an extremely complicated art style and a tiny team, you can bet that it is probably not coming out soon, or if it does, its design might suffer given the difficulty of revisions or iterating.

This applies to game design, too. For every thing the player can do, you’ve gotta somehow fit that into your game. That’s something to think about. If it needs to be clearly communicated, is it? More playtesting. More bugs. It also creates tasks for the programmer. Or, it creates art to make or music and sound to make.

It also applies to writing. Too many main characters? Now you have even more plot arcs to write, more cutscenes to make, more balancing to do with where you read them in the game. Oops, now the programmer has to code all these things too! More chances for bugs. More things to tweak. Good luck! You’ll need it. Have fun remembering all this alongside the 100,000 other things in the game.

Now, is it worth working 10 years on a game? I don’t think so.

My game Even the Ocean is a textbook example of this happening, stretching out a game’s development to 3.5 years. By not properly setting a good scope for the game within pre-production, we waffled around, resulting in numerous design, writing, and art revisions. The game was also too big – too many cutscenes, maps, levels, mechanics. If the game was drastically shorter or scoped down, these revisions wouldn’t have been as numerous or time consuming.

I think we’ve recognized this while working on Anodyne 2. I think, inevitably, some things will be and have been more complex than I think necessary. Some steps we’ve taken:

No dynamic music (less music and debugging to do.)

No autosaving (less bugs related to saving in weird places or at weird times.)

No baked lighting (less time spent making art in areas)

Very simple combat (simplifies the possibility space for 2D mechanics)

Reusable boss patterns (reduces programming time)

No collectibles outside those that advance the main game (reduces design, testing, coding, writing time)

Removing extra supplementary cutscenes we used to have planned (reduces writing, coding, etc)

Some level design tricks which I can’t talk about yet (reduces art time as well as design time and code and everything really)

Using Unity, saving tons of time on tools programming

Use of ‘fade text’ to simplify and reduce cutscenes and animations. This is the use of fading partially to black and displaying text on top, describing a cutscene, rather than actually programming and animating what the text describes.

Few custom shaders (less coding!)

Very simple models and textures (quicker art!)

Relatively loose main story (after the first hour), meaning the player less often must be guided by hand-crafted cutscenes (less coding, writing, etc!)

Few main characters, reducing complexity of the script (easier writing!)

Minimal platforming mechanics in 3D, due to the difficulty of debugging 3D physics and camera mechanics. (less coding!)

Many NPCs share animations or only have a simple bob. (less art!)

Little need for optimization thanks to most Unity scenes being small/separate. (less coding and bugfixing!)

Of course, the game is still ridiculously complicated and stressful to work on! Even with all these simplifications! Part of it is inherent to the genre we picked – a story-driven adventure in 3D and 2D, which often requires lots of unique assets.

But imagine if I had all of the above to worry about, too.

Anodyne 2 wouldn’t be coming out next year, that’s for sure.

Remember, your game doesn’t need to be complex to be good. Your ideal version of your game is not necessarily the minimum it needs to be good.

Also, a lot of this matters less if your game is much shorter. Keep in mind complexity mainly becomes a problem based on how long your game is. Also, this advice probably applies most to games that could be called similar to Anodyne, Even the Ocean, Anodyne 2, All Our Asias. I don’t know how to make an elaborate roguelike game.

A lot of what I’ve outlined above falls into a ‘lo-fi’ production ethos – trying to find shortcuts where possible and work within your capabilities. Trying to work commercially, like with Anodyne 2, does make things harder as we have to make some compromises (like putting in extra polish in parts because it helps with marketing the game). But…

I hope we can deliver Anodyne 2 on time! I’m always worried about it… but at least, this time, I’m thinking about these things.

Well, here’s an idea. If I stopped a person on the street, and they played games, if I asked which was weirder, Fortnite, or a game off of the (lovingly named and wonderful) Weird Fucking Games Twitter, which would they choose?

In popular culture, the ‘weird game’ is the polar opposite of the ‘pop game’. A pop game is a game that a random gamer would be likely to not deem ‘weird’. A pop game often has the marketing budget to drown out an entire game culture’s news cycle for a week or two, only to disappear weeks after as if it never existed. A pop game can suck up 40 hours of my time and not change me in the slightest. A pop game is often a corpgame (corporation created game). A pop game is probably not a static game.

Negate the premise of Fortnite, negate the breadth of Red Dead Redemption 2. That’s what a ‘weird game’ usually is.

I am disturbed by this definition of ‘weird’. You know what is weirder to me?

These kinds of things are called ‘violent’ or ‘wrong’, but we never categorize them as ‘weird’, they’re always considered ‘normal’.

Instead, most gamers think something is weird because a single line of dialogue was just a widdle bit too confewsing (っ◞‸◟c) or the art was too weird because a tree didn’t look like the ones in real life (｡•́︿•̀｡), or, or, a line of dialogue made them feel bad inside because it challenged their beliefs … waa waa…

Sad…

Well, I don’t have any solution for this problem. Goodbye.

Maybe let’s start using the word ‘weird’ when something deserves it.

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/weird/feed/0seanhantaniThe Traversable Imagehttps://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/the-traversable-image/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/the-traversable-image/#respondSat, 30 Jun 2018 19:52:34 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3374A theory-ish post on imagery in games I did at the end of June. Read it here:

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/the-traversable-image/feed/0seanhantaniSean Han Tani’s Game Of The Years #1https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/sean-han-tanis-game-of-the-years-1/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/sean-han-tanis-game-of-the-years-1/#commentsTue, 20 Feb 2018 00:28:32 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3347Welcome to my twice-a-month (haha oops maybe 6-times-a-year) series, Sean Han Tani’s Game Of The Years, where I critique a recent game that is good.

The first Sean Han Tani’s Game Of The Years is David Kanaga’s Oikospiel (early 2017, PC), created in Unity with tools from a past programming collaborator Fernando Ramallo (Panoramical). David has done amazing game music for games like Dyad, Proteus, Vignettes, and Panoramical. You should check out his other work, especially if you are a musician!

I am going to preface this piece with the fact that I love Oikospiel. In fact the more I write criticism or analyze a game the more I probably enjoy it. It means there’s a lot to pick apart and think about. Anyways…

And (like other games) it exists as people’s reviews, discussions on Twitter, let’s plays, etc.

I like a lot of things about Oikospiel

1. Camera angles, wow there are so many camera angles. I love this. Each camera angle is a doorway to a bunch of interesting perspective ideas. From the initial off-the-rails airplane surgery camera. To the dog camera. To the bullet camera. To the wild kokiri forest item-collecting camera. and so on. Cameras matter so much but the majority of developers tend to prioritize that of the Perfect Platformin’ Camera or the Super 3rd-Person Fightin’ Camera or Big Boy FPS Shootin’ Cam. Or as I like to say, the descendants of the Hell Design Spawn Trilogy of Mario Zeldo and DOOM, a nostalgia ouroboros from which our culture may never recover.

2. The music and sound. If I write in detail on the music I will never finish this piece, so please trust me on this one. There is a ton of experimentalism in the game from how music is formally triggered and how sound appears, to the music itself.

3. The different ways you engage with written text. E-mails, novels, text on the screen, ‘cutscenes’.

4. The use of other games within the game. Kokiri Forest appears. Recontextualizing other videogame spaces is an infinitely interesting idea.

5. It is a game that has clear intent and purpose yet is put together with pre-existing 3D assets. To make fun of it is through the traditional method – “this shits weird” – is to make yourself look like a fool. Oikospiel helps contribute to the existing canon of games whose visuals are not pretty but nonetheless convey meaning and prove that a meaningful game has no need for realistic or traditional sorts of aesthetics.

Oikospiel is the DARK SOULS of Something

Let’s Talk About Difficulty…

Is Oikospiel Difficult?

…

Oikospiel is a confusing game , it is a wild game – it is obtuse and hard to understand. These aren’t negative criticisms but “Objective” (lol) observations. I now present evidence in support of my Objective Observations:

The game’s political ideas are overshadowed (or on the other hand, maybe enhanced?) by its (intentional) ‘messy’ gameplay/visual aesthetic built from free/paid 3D models and textures available to purchase from the Unity Asset Store. It is easy to get distracted by this or wonder if you have missed something. It’s funny, because the point of some of the game’s themes are to make you think about all the work that goes into these assets – but in some way the cobbled-together visual aesthetic tends to trigger our brains to think the game is just being weird. We are cursed by gamer culture.

Counterargument: the messy visual style contributes to the theme of how unionizing can be powerful or important. I don’t know where this thought thread is going towards, because the messiness of the visuals works well in some ways… anyways

The game has various modes of displaying textual information (e-mails, documents outside the game, music scores, advertisements, even scans of books). So it’s hard to really understand the work the first time through without knowing the relation of these things to the overall game’s arc. Engagement with the written text can take place nonlinearly, you can overlook something, it’s hard to prioritize what written information is the most valuable. In some cases I interacted with some things and ended up at an earlier level of the game.

The game also has many modes of gameplay, from shifting your control between different animals, to making the camera angles change drastically, to changing your movement speed. The combined effect of this is confusion. We lack a constant player perspective since we are inhabiting many virtual bodies (often a dog, though.) It is hard to keep track of the relation of one scene to another.

We have been conditioned, as Gamers ™ to find everything about Oikospiel “weird as heck, man!” That is, as a Gamer, I found I had to actively fight the urge to dismiss sections or text as “weird.”

You may notice the bullet points above are also what I liked about the game in some ways

Now, confusion and the previous two ideas are not bad, but they do make Oikospiel a difficult work to engage with. You need to put in time to understand the game, and not just within the game – but checking what you play against the libretto, or reading David’s thoughts on the development. I’ve only played through a few times and tend to skim the libretto to keep track of what’s going on.

I think Oikospiel could have been a little clearer / organized at times without losing much. I think I read in an interview that some scenes were more loosely connected, or shuffled around. Maybe if there was a more consistent framing narrative to the various scenes, that could have helped – or including snippets of the libretto in each act of the game. I say “maybe” because there is a lot of personality in this kind of disorganization to the game.

Unions

At this point I need to mention that I love how the themes of unionizing and labor are accentuated by the game’s use of free assets and assets other people made, as well as some wordplay with the name of the game-making software used to make the game, “Unity.” It’s the first time I’ve seen the asset store stuff used in thematic way that goes along with a game’s content. I also love the appearance of spaces from other games, like Kokiri Forest, which appears early in. Being in these 3D spaces constructed from not only Kanaga’s but others’ labor is an interesting feeling to think about.

Hard-to-understand is a type of difficulty

Oikospiel is difficult game along the lines of comprehensibility. I don’t advocate for every game being easy and clear. God forbid our standards for narrative end up in Mario’s endless hell cycle of Princess Pear being kidnapped.

I think of difficulty as a quality a game can has. If it has more of it, the game is less accessible and less people can engage with it. We tend to think of difficulty in the dexterity or strategizing aspect (Super Meat Boy / MOBAs or roguelikes, etc). But Oikospiel is difficult in a comprehension sense – it requires closer study, repeat plays, and patience. It is dense of ideas. You can’t just play it once and expect to understand everything.

I have been assigning Oikospiel to my game design class for a while now, and it’s tended to be a game that’s hard to discuss because there is so much happening in the game and students may be quick to dismiss it. So I now assign the interviews as well to read alongside playing the game. I love games being difficult in this way – to require re-reading. We should cultivate careful reading from our players more in our games.

Perhaps there can be some theory of ‘difficult comprehensibility design’ just like we have 10,000 theories how to make the perfect Supa’ Mario Brother intro level. Just a thought

One of the things I think about a lot with narrative design is that it’s so easy to forget narrative snippets in a game when you transition from reading to various modes of gameplay. It’s very easy to become ‘lost’ in the themes/ideas a game is trying to present. I don’t advocate for games all having clear narrative arcs for all their ideas, but it’s good to think about the ‘difficulty’ of your narrative and if there are ways you can make a narrative more accessible without compromising your style or ideas too much. (Much like how making a dexterity-difficulty game have accessibility modes, like Even the Ocean, can be a really good thing.)

You don’t need a walkthrough to ‘beat’ Oikospiel, but you almost have to rely on external texts (interviews, friend commentary, etc.) to get the most out of the game, just like you need an encyclopedia to play Monster Hunter or learn how to play Dark Souls.

And in a sense these other texts form a sort of walkthrough, or even an extension of the game itself. Most of the game didn’t really click till I read Kanaga’s thoughts on game labor unions and his philosophy about the Asset Store. You can find one of those interviews here.

I don’t mind this. I like reading external texts. That’s why I made a big book about my recent game All Our Asias, to offer players another way of considering the game.

The ideal way to play Oikospiel, I think, is to merely latch on to what fascinates you about the game. The sound effects in an area. The strange broken nostalgia of walking around Kokiri Forest. Trying to unravel your thoughts about hearing Celine Dion samples. And to read some of Kanaga’s thoughts so as to help you parse and put together the game’s events.

All Our Asias

A lot of this ‘disjointed fabric’ of gameplay interaction and Oikospiel’s thematic content informed my recent game All Our Asias. In fact, All Our Asias started out with me coding a jetpack-like 3rd-person movement system inside of a 3D level I dragged in from Dark Souls (Firelink Shrine if anyone is curious.)

I loved the idea of using older games’ levels but changing the way we traverse and interact with them, and what Oikospiel did with Ocarina of Time’s Kokiri Forest was really cool. It makes us think about our nostalgic experiences and memories of that space, which was something I was thinking about with AOA’s “Memory World” concept – how can we recontextualize spaces, either physical or digital?

Oikospiel’s multiple camera angles let to me wanting to use interesting camera angles in AOA to convey different things. I didn’t do a lot of this, but I did start to more seriously think about the importance of visually framing spaces, and all the different effects you can get. One of my favorite visual moments in Oikospiel is falling from a flat surface in the sky, all the way down to the ground in front of some kind of concert hall.

I was inspired by the idea that people could take seriously a game that does not traditionally look attractive, which gave me a lot of confidence in pursuing AOA’s lo-fi art style and trying to pack it full of narrative themes and meaningful art/spaces.

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/sean-han-tanis-game-of-the-years-1/feed/2seanhantaniEven the Ocean’s Music: Part 1 – Organizational Forces.https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/even-the-oceans-music-part-1-organizational-forces/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/even-the-oceans-music-part-1-organizational-forces/#respondTue, 09 Jan 2018 03:51:41 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3348New essay I posted on Medium containing some thoughts about how composers can figure out what sort of song to write for a game, how I used these ideas to compose Even the Ocean’s soundtrack, how I organized the soundtrack, and how I also used the idea of motif to help guide the composition process. And some thoughts about music genre. Read it here!
]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/even-the-oceans-music-part-1-organizational-forces/feed/0seanhantani(Medium.com) Difficulty and Gameplay Options in Even the Oceanhttps://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/medium-com-difficulty-and-gameplay-options-in-even-the-ocean/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/medium-com-difficulty-and-gameplay-options-in-even-the-ocean/#respondTue, 05 Dec 2017 16:51:45 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3345Hi all, I recently wrote a short essay about Joni and I’s thinking about difficulty settings in our 2016 game Even the Ocean. Read it here: https://medium.com/@sean_htch/difficulty-and-gameplay-options-in-even-the-ocean-aa67b5ae776b

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/medium-com-difficulty-and-gameplay-options-in-even-the-ocean/feed/0seanhantani(EXCERPT) Tokyo Lo-fi: Shin Megami Tensei Nocturnehttps://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/excerpt-tokyo-lo-fi-shin-megami-tensei-nocturne/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/excerpt-tokyo-lo-fi-shin-megami-tensei-nocturne/#respondTue, 14 Nov 2017 03:27:38 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3332Hey all, so recently I published an essay on Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne in the Heterotopias journal – here’s an excerpt of it which I originally posted as a preview on Gamasutra.

This is an excerpt from Heterotopias 003, the third issue of the game and architecture zine, which is now available to purchase for $6.To read the rest of the article, which further analyzes the techniques used in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, go grab your copy over on itch.io.

In Joni Kittaka and I’s eight-plus hour game Even the Ocean, I spent days fixing the animations of a mole that walks along tunnels in a single area, rather than replacing the mole with something less animation-heavy. This level of detail applied to every aspect of the game—such as cutscenes, art style revisions, and level design—contributed to the development time of three-and-a-half years.

For a long time I believed the only way to reduce the costs of content-heavy games with high-fidelity art was to make them smaller. But, recently, I’ve found another and perhaps better solution to reduce the traditional quality of the art. What stopped me from this discovery before was the prevalent attitude towards what are deemed ‘lo-fi graphics’—a widely-held view is that they are inherently bad. But this shouldn’t be the case. They are not always a rush job or a mistake. They have, in recent years, even emerged as an art style in their own right. We can and should do more than dismiss lo-fi graphics as a historical stepping stone, inferior to photorealistic or HD art styles.

Consider games before 2010 with total or partial lo-fi art styles. Some of these older games aspired towards photorealism while lacking the hardware to do so effectively. Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (hereon Nocturne) is a visually striking game, despite its ‘old’ graphics. First released in Japan in early 2003, it is a monster-collecting JRPG set in post-apocalyptic Tokyo. It had a team of about 15 artists, as opposed to the roughly 500 (counting contractors) artists that worked on Final Fantasy XV.

Nocturne is full of ‘low-quality’ textures, objects, and spaces, yet its art style conjures an atmosphere more thematically dense and memorable than many contemporary games. Interrogating the art style shows Nocturne achieves this atmosphere through abstraction-based techniques for visual and spatial design. What is exciting about these techniques is that some of them do not require years of technical training in programming or visual arts, and thus, these techniques are easy for game developers to use to create new forms of visual expression in their games.

Nocturne’s setting

In Nocturne, Tokyo has just gone through a nuclear apocalypse, and so it has the player travel the city in order to decide how to rebuild it. Nocturne makes no attempt to create a realistic Tokyo, instead, it focuses on abstractions of public and commercial spaces like subways and malls, occasionally with more directly referenced real-world spaces, such as Shibuya Crossing.

While the artists aimed to dress the game’s spaces in realistic textures, the art direction is ethereal—this is accomplished through the eerie lack of human presence, a refusal to make accurate recreations of Tokyo spaces, and the use of unrealistic lighting. The latter is especially captivating, as it sees ambient lighting illuminate empty rooms in bizarre shades of purple or blue, lights cast in impractical ways, and shadows appearing without visible light sources.

Post-apocalypse Shinjuku Medical Center

Shibuya Crossing

Blurriness, sharpness, and immersion

Without actively looking, it’s harder to notice the lack of photorealism in the floor tiles of Nocturne’s subways than it is to notice it in a poster on the wall. Advertisements, printed materials, and commercial items like clothing appear throughout Nocturne, all of which invite players to parse them for written or visual information. But these objects aren’t suited to that type of inspection and only cause the fidelity of the game to fracture. Posters and ads appear too blurry or too sharp; a stack of newspapers resembles a cube rather than individual sheets, making it clear these were objects placed as atmospheric shorthands rather than sources of information.

These types of objects act strangely in games. Look at the “Yushima Station: Safety Message” picture. If the object is blurry, like the station exit diagram on the left, it immediately separates the player’s reality from the game’s should they attempt to read it. There also exists a problem when the object is clear and readable, like the warning sign on the right, as this isn’t a game about obeying train signs, and its sharpness makes it weirdly readable when almost everything else around it is hazy. The artist who placed this sign probably wanted it to stand as a nod to the pre-apocalyptic history of the station platform, as a way to ground it in a reality closer to the player’s, but its inconsistency with the textures around it pull it more towards achieving the opposite.

One solution to this would be to remove all the posters and signs, but that may make Tokyo strangely bare. Whereas rendering the posters blurry makes them too obviously fake, having them sharp enough to read causes them to stand out too much in this indistinct world. It is better to view these ‘problems’ as a technique that can, like the train station signs, be utilized to carefully place references to reality into a less realistic space.

Yushima Station: Safety Message and Station Exit Map

To read the rest of this article purchase Heterotopias 003 over on itch.io.

Sean Han Tani is a developer of Anodyne (2013), Even the Ocean (2016), and currently, All Our Asias. He also lectures about game design and game music production at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/excerpt-tokyo-lo-fi-shin-megami-tensei-nocturne/feed/0seanhantaniHospital_ReceptionistShibuya_CrossingSignYushima_Warning8 Ways To Not Spatially Organize Your Game (Banjo-Kazooie: Part 2)https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/banjo2/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/banjo2/#respondFri, 27 Oct 2017 20:52:42 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=3081In light of Super Mario Odyssey’s release, I realized there’s a timely angle to look at BK with. Rather than summarize the levels like with Part 1, I’ll go over some of the major causes of getting lost/confused in BK. By no means do I suggest these are bad things to do, but they may be counterproductive to your goals in a 3D game, especially if you are doing something with ‘box-garden’ design like BK (or Mario 64, etc.)

Maybe this will make your Mario Odyssey playthrough more interesting, given that it is a semi-box-garden style design? Let’s see… at number one…

1. Mismatch of Interior Size to Exterior Visual Size

At least BK is consistent with this! Nearly every interior space in BK is much bigger than the exterior would suggest. This is something you might *Want* to do in a 3D game. Say you have a central castle in a level that you also need to navigate the exterior grounds of. It feels better for that castle to not be huge and boring to walk around. But if the castle’s interior is proportionately small, then it might not be as exciting or interesting, unless you are working in the style of Dark Souls or similar ‘realistic’ architecture games.

The “bigger on the inside” trope, can often make areas easier to navigate (take small pokemon starting towns). But, when a particular structure that is “Bigger on the Inside” is in 3D and has too many entrances, it can become confusing.

Example: In level 7, Mad Monster Mansion, the exterior is realistically sized, to make it easier to navigate around and see, but then the inside is far larger, to make it more fun to move around in.

One problem here is you can enter the mansion through a front door or a window to the left. Though these two entrances are only a few feet apart, they lead to entirely different spaces – respectively, a gigantic dining room, and some smaller alcove. To make matters worse, the alcove should technically be inside the dining room.

This makes it harder to make a mental map of the overall level. We don’t just have to remember that these two spaces connect. We also have to remember the additional information that the two spaces are related in an non-physically-realistic manner. This mostly matters in box-garden-style games, where you progressively consume and make a map of the level. In a more linear game, it may not matter as much. I do the “larger on the inside” thing a few times in All Our Asias. The difference with AOA, is that remembering the specific connections between spaces is not as important, thus it’s less likely to result in being lost. Though there still may be a sense of disorientation – which may be good!

2. poorly-signed, screen-transition-connected subareas

Poorly-signed means an entrance to an area is not very distinct – it’s hard to identify where the entrance is going.

A screen-transition-connected area is when you go from one subarea of a level to another and the screen fades to black, or there’s a loading screen, etc. E.g.: Mansion to mansion exterior in the above example.

Most games need screen transitions. It is worth mentioning that the more ‘screen fades’ you have in a 3D level, the harder it will be to remember how to navigate it. How many times have you left some new building in real life, and not been sure which way to turn? The same thing happens in games. A screen transition breaks the sense of spatial continuity and causes disorientation. This becomes more of an issue the larger an environment grows.

Generally a 3D game might fix the disorientation problem with a minimap or some kind of map – something to help you get your bearings when entering a new space. But… over-reliance on a map will reduce how well a player picks up on landmarks and really learns how to navigate a space. Or the game can make the inside/outside relatively clear and with few entrances. E.g., the sandcastle puzzle in Treasure Trove Cove is a very iconic building, and so it’s easy to know where it goes from looking at it. Again, in a more linear game, this is not as big of a problem, because you can generally emphasize that the place you are *leaving* is not as important as where you’re going. But in something with a box-garden design you need to be more careful.

This issue compounds with the interior/exterior size mismatch problem.

The worst textbook example of this, which BK does not have, is straight up teleporting you to another place without any sense of logical spatial connection. Think teleport mazes in puzzle or RPG games.

BK has this issue in a few places.

Mad Monster Mansion: the mansion has many window entrances, that are of course hard to keep track of because they look the same.

Rusty Bucket Bay: The level’s outer rim with storehouses/etc have many entrances that are hard to keep track of because of similar appearance. The main boat has many portholes you can enter with similar problems.

Gobi’s Valley (Level 6, which I’ll come back to soon), which features pyramids and sphinxes with entrances. What’s on the outside doesn’t always match the inside… and so it’s hard to remember where a particular challenge is. Still, there are relatively few rooms in Gobi’s Valley so it doesn’t become a huge issue.

BK does get it right, though. E.g.:

Mumbo’s Mountain has a single anthill. Easy to know where that goes.

The big turtle and crocodile in Bubblegloop Swamp. Go to a simple place.

Christmas Tree and single ice cave in Freezeezy Peak.

3. Swimming

Swimming in BK is a nightmare, probably its biggest mistake. There’s a short air meter, even *enemies*, sometimes a shark that chases you, and in a later level the water drains your air meter twice as fast. Not to mention, swimming is slowly and unwieldy, and you are expected to collect things underwater.

Why is it disorienting? Well, you are moving in all three dimensions, freely. Water is usually harder to see in, and because you don’t have gravity stabilizing you, and the controls are so bad, it’s super easy to get turned around or confused as to where you are going. 3rd person cameras can be a little tricky in the water. This makes levels like Clanker’s Cavern or parts of Rusty Bucket Bay much harder than they need to be. Being in water is sort of like throwing static all over a minimap or just negating all the progress you made in trying to remember where you’ve gone in a space. Add in the air meter, and you now have pressure that makes it harder to think clearly.

I’m iffy about water. I would just leave it out of my games, or make it more of some kind of jetpack like control, where the Y-axis movement is not totally free – some way of making it less disorienting for the player. At the least, keeping your ‘water entry areas’ relatively distinct could be a good move (rather than say, a giant lake you could enter from any point on the shore.)

4. Poorly signed / laid out tunnels

It’s hard to keep your sense of direction in tunnels due to the visual uniformity. It’s also difficult to use landmarks to reference where you have come from and where you want to go. All you see is tunnel.

This is made worse by slightly curving tunnels: you can’t try to remember right angles or ‘easy’ directional changes, you can only follow the tunnel and hope you find an exit. Good way to make you feel lost, though! Mixed with a map, this can actually be okay (think the maze-like tunnel dungeons of SMT Nocturne.)

You can make tunnels harder to navigate with by making their entrances and exits discreet. Put lots of tunnels next to each other to make things even worse.

And to top it off, you could even put tunnels in the water!

Example: Navigating the water tunnels in the final leg of the hub world. This has problems: not only are you using the most disorienting mode of movement (Swimming), but you are connecting places with tunnels.

(Left: an underwater tunnel in the hub world. Right: a tunnel entrance, then the tunnel.)

Or, the tunnels in the water in Clanker’s Cavern. The entrances’ similar coloration makes it easy to forget which tunnel you’ve visited.

5. Lack of Color Variation in Level

Gobi’s Valley: everything is Yellow.

While this at-a-distance picture looks fine, you’re much closer to things in the game’s 3rd person camera, and so even the structural distinctions might get lost amongst the overall Yellow. It’s good that the borders of Gobi’s Valley are brown, at least. Anyways, it follows that if everything is a similar color, it’s harder to tell parts of the level apart.

Compare Mumbo’s Mountain where paths lead you around and there’s clearer color distinctions with the grass, hills, water, central mountain.

6. Lines of sight to other parts of the level broken by walls

When you can’t see to the rest of a level, you can easily feel lost or boxed in… in some ways this is a less intense ‘tunnel effect’. You aren’t sure where you are going or how you are oriented. Mad Monster Mansion has this problem: the hedge fences are tall, uniformly dark, so it’s really hard to tell what side of the mansion you’re on sometimes. Click Clock Wood can be tough to remember where you are (at first) because your line of sight to the other side of the level is cut off by the central giant tree.

Compare Rusty Bucket Bay, which has a central boat in a pool, then a perimeter area. You can at least see what side of the boat you are on, so it’s easy to tell where you are overall in the level (though not necessarily easy to get to somewhere due to the water – RBB has its issues.)

BK pretty consistently increases the ‘broken lines of sight’ as the levels get bigger, partially because of more landmarks / more open space. In some ways, BK’s difficulty comes from having to remember more and more of a 3D space in your head. I think spatial organization topic is why Mumbo’s Mountain (Level 1) feels so strong – it’s really easy to get a sense of the level’s scale at a glance.

Level 4, Bubblegloop swamp (mentioned later), breaks lines of sight – but because it organizes its space in a hub-spoke form, it’s not too bad to navigate. I kind of like the hub-spoke structure: put challenges or singular things at the end of a spoke, so people know how to navigate back to the hub to find the next thing they didn’t do or see.

7. Lack of Landmarks

I wanted to throw this one in here, BK actually does this really well. But if you are designing something in an ‘box-garden’ fashion like BK, you should make sure the sections of the level have some distinct feature to them – a landmark – that can be used for players to navigate with and judge their sense of place. One issue I’ve seen with first-time Unity students is making the terrain tool and creating high, bumpy and indistinct mountains. A good way to make landmarks is to do concept sketches of a level and include distinct sections/buildings/geological forms.

Landmark examples…

The termite hill in Mumbo’s Mountain.

The central mountain of Treasure Trove Cove.

Clanker, in clanker’s cavern.

Freezeezy Peak’s Snowman.

Click Clock Wood’s mumbo house.

I really love the structure of Bubblegloop Swamp – while I think its color choices can be a bit uniform and confusing, it has a central location with different branches, and each branch has clear landmarks to let you know what the branch is. My one complaint is the maze in the bottom left, which is hard to see from the center, and thus, hard to remember that there’s a Mumbo hut there (a place you need to go to transform into an alligator.)

8. Excessive + confusing vertical layering

This relates a little to how swimming can get confusing, with having too much freedom of movement in 3D space. When a level starts to build tons of vertical layers, it gets harder to remember where you are – you aren’t just thinking about your flat, X-Z plane position, but also the vertical Y position.

In BK, most clear is the sense of place you lose when climbing up the giant tree in Click Clock Wood (see 2:35 on here). While you can sort of remember where you generally are on the spiral path, it’s hard to remember what is all the way below you.

Treasure Trove Cove initially feels daunting because you have both the ground-level paths and the rocky-raised-structure paths.

This is also why a lot of early 2D platformers can be confusing – too much vertical layering, and the camera is very close to the player so it’s hard to see what’s around you. (Watch Toy Story 2 for a while.) Maybe this is also why Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid feature minimaps. This is partially why Even the Ocean featured mostly linear levels.

It’s not like you can’t vertically layer spaces or have vertical variation – but it might be good to keep the vertically layered space linear (like the timed challenge in Bubblegloop Swamp – see 1:34).

Now compare that to say, the scaffolding of an apartment building construction site, with intersecting scaffolding – that could get confusing, fast, depending on the level design!

That’s all for Banjo-Kazooie – it’s a nice game to check out if you haven’t, at least for the first 2 levels !

I’m Sean Han Tani and I worked on Anodyne and Even the Ocean. I write a lot of music and also teach music and game design at SAIC in Chicago. Now, I’m working on a 3D game coming out this year, All Our Asias.

]]>https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/banjo2/feed/0seanhantanitreasyre.PNGScreen Shot 2017-10-26 at 11.25.36 AM.pngGobis_Valley_entry260px-Banjo-Kazooie_Mumbo's_Mountain_Entrance_and_Lakebanjo-kazooie_bubble_gloop_swamp_notesScreen Shot 2017-10-27 at 3.50.21 PM.pngPeritextual Game Music (Writing Music for Games, Part 1)https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/peritextual-game-music-writing-music-for-games-part-1/
https://seanhantani.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/peritextual-game-music-writing-music-for-games-part-1/#commentsTue, 24 Oct 2017 19:31:20 +0000http://seanhantani.wordpress.com/?p=2721This essay is based on lecture notes for my Video Game Music Composition class I’ve been teaching at SAIC.

For this essay, I want to look at approaches towards title screen, pause/save menu music, and motivations for these approaches. This essay does not go into music theoretical breakdowns of the mentioned songs.

Peritext, Paratext, Epitext…

In the recent 2016 collection, Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, Michiel Kamp wrote a paper called “Suture and Peritexts: Music Beyond Gameplay and Diegesis”. In it, Kamp proposes :

“that there are two primary ways of understanding music beyond diegetic gameplay sequences: as peritexts (Genette, 1997; Summers, 2012) and as a structuring device that relates different situations to each other in time.” (Source)

A peritext is part of a model of viewing an Artwork. The model posits that a work can be viewed as two separate parts, the text and paratext. The text is the work itself, in the case of a game – roughly, the gameplay. The paratext consists of other things a consumer encounters on their way to playing the game. Reviews, fan theories, marketing, the title screen, all of which color the experience of playing the game.

A paratext is further broken down into two parts, epitext and peritext. Peritext consists of “materials that surround and are attached to the text itself: a book’s cover and index…” (Ludomusicology, 75). Epitext is everything else: marketing, trailers, fan theories, criticism, hype.

So, in the case of a game, the peritext is often things like: the title screen, save menu, loading screens, credits, main menus. They are ‘part of the game’, yet not in the same way the moment-to-moment gameplay is. This definition doesn’t generalize perfectly over all games, but it will do for now.

Peritexts seem to exist on a spectrum of distance from the ‘text’ of the game. What is peritext and what is not depends on the game, but can be determined by considering how a particular moment in the game moves our experience with it to and from the text of the game. Kamp created a helpful chart (distortion is mine, whoops.). What is peritextual here is debatable, but you can tell that the non-gameplay+nondiegetic elements are clearly more peritextual than say, the gameplay+diegetic elements. Of course, you may have a game like OneShot or Metal Gear Solid that play with peritext in a 4th-wall-breaking way, by asking you to unplug controllers or look on your computer desktop.

Okay So What Does This Have To Do With Music

What was exciting about reading this paper (and this essay) was that it finally gave a name, ‘peritextual music’, to music that appears in title screens, credits, intro sequences.

On an intuitive level, a good game composer will know what this music is supposed to sound like, but it was nice to find that how this music operates can partially be explained by a model used to analyze other creative artworks.

Peritextual game music can be broken into a few categories:

“Diegetic Break-Smoothing”

Location: Pause Menus. Inventory Menus. Death Music.

Preserve a player’s engagement with the game that may be reduced by the diegetic breaks caused the above situations. “Smooths over” these breaks. Help stabilize the ‘temporal ebb and flow‘ (Ludomusicology, 78) of intensity in engagement with a game’s text.

“Preparation to Enter the game”

Location: Title screens, pre-title cutscenes, Character Creation music, menus taking place before entering the game.

This music helps the player enter the world of the game, hints at what is to come, or, “primes” the player to engage with the text. The main distinction from the above.

Overlapping cases:

Location: Loading screens (the loading screen from the title screen of Dragon Quest XI is the same as the one that shows when we fast travel.)

Rare cases when the title screen is the same as a pause menu (As Kamp mentions, this happens in Max Payne).

Settings and Save menus can vary in presentation and music depending on the game.

Title Screen Music

A good title screen theme draws you in to the fiction of the game. It understands that it is the first piece that cuts you off from the audio of your immediate physical surroundings, and that is offering a preview or taste of the game. Songs here may draw upon important melodic motifs or instruments used throughout the game’s soundtrack. Or, they may conjure up images and feelings representative of the game. The energy of the song – whether on the slower/calmer side, or more intense/upbeat side, is dictated by the game.

Take the title screen of Final Fantasy 13, which contains the main theme. While FF13 is not the strongest game, the song hints at the game’s narrative themes and conceits of trying to save friends and siblings and maintaining hope. It does this in a gentle way, with light piano, and quiet orchestral accompaniments. This method works well in games with strong casts of characters and a well-written main theme, when the game is dramatic enough to merit these sorts of grand title themes. Final Fantasy 15 takes a similar approach.

The title theme from my game Even the Ocean, “A Streak of Lavender”, slowly fades in the atmosphere of the game. The melody played by the lead synth incorporates the main Even the Ocean motif, but is recontextualized in a more melancholic, mysterious manner (than say, the credits theme, or introductory story theme, or orchestral-like overworld song.) However, the game isn’t all just that sort of semi-dark fantastical mystery, and so the 2nd half of the song is an ethereal mix of a string-like sound and piano (I was actually riffing off the end of the FF13 theme here, which does a similar job of using more ethereal sounds in order to suggest you to begin and enter the game.) The title screen of Even the Ocean focuses on an image of a cabin in the woods – and my focus with the song was to try and transport you into this mysterious setting, before the Storyteller brings you into the game proper.

An example of a weak title theme would be Donkey Kong Country 2. This is bizarre because of the high quality of its songs, including the excellent Stickerbrush Symphony. The issue here is not a poorly written song (though it does cut out sort of suddenly), but more that it fails to encompass the overall feel of the game. The title theme sounds quite dark and forboding, and while it does play with ‘pirate’ motifs present in the games’ levels and songs, I wouldn’t call this characteristic of the game, which has an interesting mix of thick atmospheres and subtle humor. Weirder is the very happy file select music and then the again, forboding level select music that follow. The title in DKC2 feels like something that wasn’t as hardly thought about. Either way, it seems fine because the file select music is catchy and sort of overrides the short title screen.

Introductory Menu Music

Some games, when re-using the title screen song is inappropriate, will have separate songs for important title/main menu stuff. A strong example is Phantasy Star Online’s main menu music, “Prenotion”, and character creation music, “Image A Hero”. The main menu music immediately sets the general tone of the game – futuristic synths, a sense of flying through space.

(I would argue that PSO fails to live up to this title screen, which, based on FF15 and 13’s failures, I can only chalk up to that it’s much easier to write a song encompassing a theoretical ideal game, vs. pulling off a ‘perfect’ game worked on with financial expectations and many workers. I’m not complaining, title screen music is interesting in that it gives us a view into an ideal, perfected game.)

PSO has a mission structure where you accept quests from a spaceship, and then beam down to the planet to explore. But I think the story felt a little light, which goes against the interesting grandeur of the main menu music.

Likewise, this happens with the character creation music, which serves to almost prepare you for the bright lights of the game’s main hub world spaceships.

Pause Screen Music

Some games add music to the pause menus. Some game just leave the current environment’s music looping, optionally lowering the volume or filtering out higher frequencies. These approaches function differently in terms of how they preserve or interrupt the game’s diegesis. I don’t find one or the other to be stronger, as they have different effects. So it’s worth noting that interruption of the game’s diegesis is not necessarily a bad thing.

Upbeat, Preparatory Approach

Final Fantasy 15 has an upbeat pause theme. The pause menu has information about the game and shows the main characters standing, hanging out. I wonder why they chose to add a pause menu theme – my guess is it would be odd to pause the game in a battle, and have the music keep playing, and then see my four main characters hanging out in some blue, empty space, acting relaxed and chill, while their ‘in-game’ selves are fighting a giant dragon. The song helps to cover up the intrusive pause menu, with music that focuses on the game’s main musical motifs, and allows the player to focus on memories of the journey so far.

Pokemon TCG has a great theme. What’s weird is this pause theme tends to interrupt this overworld theme. In addition, the pause menu is a short loop, and you usually spend minutes rearranging your deck and strategizing. So it makes less sense to me to have a potentially irritating song there, though the pause theme has much more of a ‘let’s prepare for a fight!” feel to it.

This NBA Live 97 theme is similar to Pokemon TCG in terms of function, presumably.

Quiet Ambience Approach

I’m not sure how far this dates back. But in a lot of AAA games, the game will go nearly silent when pausing the game, though still have some light ambience. See Assassin’s Creed IV. This theme from The Wolf Among Us is a more brooding and present.

I think, in the case of Assassin’s Creed, the effect here is to remind you of the game’s narrative framing device – the game being a simulation of an ancestor’s memory. So while the game audio may be interrupted, in some sense, the near silence makes sense narratively. The pause menu is transporting you to a new space, just like the FF15 pause menu, rather than overlaying a UI.

In GTA V, there’s a lightly melodic, ambient drone piece for the pause menu. The feeling here is one of rest/reflection. It’s strange – why not just keep the music playing in game? I haven’t played in a while, but you can listen to music while driving, and presumably while walking around. In a game that focuses on personalizing one’s musical experience, it feels odd to cut that off with some Tangerine Dream piece.

Melodic Rest Approach

Kirby: Planet Robobot. Somewhat close to the “upbeat” approach, but with more of a muzak/elevator music feel to it. This reminds me of music that plays on a handheld when you get up to do something, and you end up forgetting about the game for a few minutes while the song loops. It kind of inspires reflection on the game, because the music is transporting you slightly out of whatever you were doing in-game.

The Banjo-Kazooie theme, while irritating with its horns and banjo, functions similarly. Somehow, it’s a little endearing (likely because of it echoing the game’s main musical themes.)

Some games do nothing, like Even the Ocean, which just loops the current area’s music. I did this partly out of not thinking much about the idea of music while paused. My earlier game, Anodyne, also has no special music for the pause menu. My intuition is this approach works well when the UI is clearly just an overlay, rather than an entire different space (like Assassin’s creed or FF15). That is, no matter what’s in the pause menu (within reason), it won’t be too big of an interruption. Of course, what you sacrifice is the possibility of conjuring feelings of preparation (like in Pokemon TCG or FF15). But, it’s possible that narrative diegesis is better preserved as there are no cuts in a level’s audio.

That’s it for this time, see everyone in Part 2! Not sure what it will be about – maybe complaints about overused instruments in ‘fire/hot/lava’ levels and their stereotyping effect on some cultures.